As a treat, if you read the entire blog today, I’ll point out something most people would miss, and explain why it is so. Meanwhile, I’m roasting in the early summer weather, watching action movies. This is why my priority is to get out of town for the hot season. Here’s a circuit I worked on since 5:00 AM while it was cool and windy. And this relates to what I’m going to explain.
This circuit, the most complicated I’ve built, is a demo of the progress. There are actually three duplicate patterns, controlling the yellow, green, and red LEDs. The effect is pretty, but it is kind of useless as it is really a step in my learning to make advanced designs. The Hungarian lady I was to meet, well, as things drag along slowly, one begins to pick up fragments of data. It would appear this lady is not right in the head. There’s always an explanation why a 42 woman is still single. Also, ladies, when a guy asks you if you have any single friends, he’s not asking your opinion on whether they’re nice or not. Just make the intro and let him decide. Quit playing matchmaker, not one of you are any good at it. Or he’d be after you and not asking about your friends, ergo.
Prezzo’s. That’s the name of that club slash restaurant I walked into in Aventura (five years ago), and walked right back out again. Now called Zuckerello’s or something yuppie, I recall Prezzo’s because that night the place was full of people my own age with whom I had nothing in common. Zero. They were overdressed, smelled of expensive lotions, with not a smart phone in sight. My instant impression was, like meeting my family, a congested room of smooth talkers who totally missed the boat. About six hundred times. This year alone.
I particularly recall the lady who resembled Drew Carrie with a beehive. She had these arced, plucked eyebrows and gave me her most practiced “why aren’t you wearing a 30 year old suit and tie?” look. That was apparently the dress code. These are not the sort of people I ever mingle with unless forced by circumstance. Which brings me to the promised topic today.
Have you noticed I rarely talk about the future in specific terms? But that future is very real and heading this way at top speed. I have budgets and projections, but both [of those] are items already completed. This timing distinction is important and intentional. There is a strong built-in psychological reason why I don’t mention things much until after they are done or at least at the stage there is nothing anyone can do about it. That’s what I’ll explain next.
I grew up in a large family that, between them, never came up with a single original idea or a single meaningful accomplishment between them. No, I’m not exaggerating, don’t ever think that. Not one of them ever built or learned or finished anything extra-curricular. Did I say extra-curricular? But what they did do was sit there and watch for me to do something first. You know the type.
Suddenly, they had to do the same thing with fanatical compulsion. Not all of them every time, but always enough to slow things down until you ran out of patience, tools or money. And that was their intention: evil, jealous, bitter competition for scarce resources to prevent you from getting ahead.
There was no escape for my parents encouraged this destructive practice. Everything I did made them look bad; (that’s misleading because doing anything at all had the same effect) you need only look at my musical career for proof. This pattern had fully evolved by the time I was ten years old. By then, my parents were already holding back all useful tools, all good influences, they even held me back in school and refused to let me learn a trade.
The only way to get anything done was to keep it a secret until it was past the point of no return. Here’s a nasty trick. I used to throw them red herrings, causing them untold waste in the wrong direction. But it got them off my back. Now don’t go ut-tut finger-waving, you were not there and I never failed to warn them not to copy me. I’d tell them direct since subtlety doesn’t work with brutes. (Later, like when they started mysteriously showing up in the same city as me a thousand miles away, I finally cut off all information.)
The result? Not one of my family can type, or play piano, or sing, or dance. There are no blogs, no legacy of helping others, no life-long accomplishments. No knowledge or skills worth passing on. None can program, or tell you a meaningful adventure, or speak a foreign language. Their lives contain no options that make existence meaningful. (I heard stories twenty years later, how once they could not trouble my affairs, the lot of them sat down and did nothing. Well, except the farting contests. I’m certain they still hold those.)
To this very day, you won’t find me telling anybody about anything I’m doing until it is too late for them to get in the way. That seems to bother some people. Good, they should be pleased to learn there are dozens of other gems in the making that I’ve never said a word about yet. But one thing I’m most proud of: Today, and since the very day I left home at 17, I am as unlike my family as it is humanly possible to become in one lifetime.
So there.
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